Speculating On Zonoff and ADT

Following on to last week's news about ADT's standalone DIY security and home automation appliance, Julie Jacobson had a good piece talking about who would be the backend provider for the system.

She speculates that it could be Zonoff, and I think she's probably on to something. The bigger question may ultimately be if whether Zonoff is also going to insert itself as the home automation cloud for ADT's Pulse service, and I think there's also a good chance there might be some truth to that as well.

Part of the reason I think this might be true is the rumors have been floating about that ADT has been looking to replace Icontrol, either through creating its own homegrown platform or through a new partner, and I've heard Zonoff floated as one of the potential candidates.

It's also somewhat interesting to note that about the time Zonoff announced a new round of funding, Icontrol decided to take them to court over infringing on their intellectual property. Icontrol's been taking a more aggressive stance in the last few years over its IP, and there's no doubt one reason might be that they're seeing companies like Zonoff competing for some of their existing customers. Whether or not it's Zonoff can't yet be confirmed, but as I have heard, and Julie has reported, ADT might very well have been aligning themselves with the company (and very well could have been the mystery strategic investor for Zonoff's monster series B round).

The bottom line is both Icontrol and Alarm.com were early to the market, but now that newer platforms have since come to market, they're being forced to play some defense. We may just now be seeing some light shined on these deals in the coming months.